Parents, Why Are You Pushing Your Children?

Two days ago we published a guest blog by some Lexington parents concerning the selections for the varsity basketball teams. Were they biased? We have since been told that 20 were chosen out of 35 applicants, or about 57%. We will assume that students knew approximately what the odds were for making the team before the two-day selection process. 

While we're happy to give local citizens a voice, we certainly don't agree with everything sent to us. If we had been a Lexington parent, we would have simply tried to determine how much the child wanted to play. If this was some life-long dream, a little more coaching and a "better luck next year" would have been our preferred method of handling the situation. 

Almost immediately after publishing the blog on the Lexington team, we opened an e-mail from a Muscle Shoals parent. The main thrust of this guest blog was the inequality of boys' sports with girls' sports. Aha, this was something that seemingly needed to be pointed out, and we had no qualms about publishing it. 

The parent who sent the blog also mentioned some treatment of other players that was presumed to be preferential. In hindsight we should have deleted this short section; however, we let it stand the way it was written. Let's just say the mother of one of the softball players felt her child had been maligned. In fact, she was so upset, she sent a comment using her own name. Do we publish or not? It's always been our policy to publish comments unless they're libelous or vulgar, and this one was no exception. If she thought her child was embarrassed by the original article, how embarrassed is this child now?

Why do parents turn into absolute fanatics when it comes to their children's sports? How do these children feel when they don't live up to their parents' expectations? We also feel extreme sympathy for the coaches who have to deal with these parents. 

At one time parents used sports as a teaching tool: No, Johnny, you don't win every time in real life. Now they say: You were cheated. Where will these kids be in 20 years? If they're still expecting to be winners in every situation, we shudder to think.

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Now our funny for the day. It seems a northwest Alabama man who is in some serious trouble was upset about the coverage his drug arrest had brought to his family. After he and his wife bailed out of jail, he promptly took to Facebook to tell these news outlets that they weren't arrested. That's right...they were only booked.